Listened to The Teaching Company's Philosophy of the Middle Ages during my commute. Excellent coverage of the philosophical work of Augustine, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm, Abelard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham. Matter-of-factly analyzes and critiques the basic arguments of each.

Hardy Boys - The Great Airport Mystery. M., my 8 year old, listened to the entire audio on Saturday, riveted. One down and 57 to go.

More Narnia in the car with M. and H., my 6 year old. Trying to get through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but its rare we're all in the car for longer stretches. Yes, we're going totally out of order.

How not to get cheap audiobooks - go to Audible and just start shopping. As it turns out many Audible books are available as companion audiobooks to Kindle titles at Amazon via "whispersync". For example, John Lee's nice recording of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is on Audible for $25, but if you get the right Kindle edition for $2.50, you can add this audiobook via whispersync for $2.99. What's more, you can watch the text of the Kindle version progressively highlighted as the audiobook plays, bouncing-ball style. Why only use one sense modality when you can use two? Other nice audiobooks I got this way: Beyond Good & Evil, Crime and Punishment, The Invisible Man (Wells), Orthodoxy (Chesterton).

So I'm almost seven hours in to Crime and Punishment with fourteen to go. Its a work I find myself returning to time and again for whatever reason. Sadly, the only recording I have found of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed is annoying.

I have also sampled parts of The Teaching Company's Philosophy of Science, which sounds terrific. The problem is, I really want to jot things down while listening, which I can't do in the car.

Goethe fans: there is a very nice German recording of Die Leiden des jungen Werther on Audible for $0.76! I have no idea why it should be so cheap.

By chance on Spotify I rediscovered Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by Arvo Pärt. Who knew you could to that with a descending minor scale? Richard Strauss did some beautiful tone painting with the descending minor scale in the beginning and end of Eine Alpinsinfonie (a guilty favorite), but the Cantus is of a different order entirely.